Need For Speed Most Wanted: Open-World Racing With Autolog's Smarts

Crunch time approaches at Criterion's Guildford studio. In the building they share with publisher EA, the developers of Need For Speed: Most Wanted are knuckling down to their last few weeks on this open-world racing game.

Time pressure keeps them from slicing press demos out of their unfinished game, but they serve up in-progress code with the total confidence of a well-proven racing studio. These are game makers with Burnout Paradise and Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit most recently under their belts.

As Webster tells it, Criterion’s experience with Burnout Paradise and with Autolog, Hot Pursuit’s influential social suite, pointed them straight to this reimagining of Most Wanted: an open-world racer based on constant social competition to be the city’s most notorious car jockey.

Though it is tagged Need For Speed, the game feels much more like Burnout Paradise than the original Most Wanted. Paradise City has been swapped for the handsome, fictional American burg of Fairhaven, but Burnout’s exhilarating slow-motion takedowns abound along all 100 miles of road and ramps, through dirt tracks, industrial lots, the harbour district, and built-up downtown area.

In single-player, you vie with AI cars in races, police chases, and other events while Criterion’s upgraded Autolog system rates your every accomplishment--from race times to speed trap records--in real time against those of your offline friends. In multiplayer, you hoon around Fairhaven with buddies in a lobbyless, seamless playlist of events, chasing each other to the next starting point in a crash-happy convoy.

In our time with the multiplayer, we are commanded by automatically generated playlist to compete for the longest drift around a circular pier and biggest jump across an unfinished elevated highway, and to battle for first place in free-for-all and team races. In all events you can excel by being either the best driver or the most effective crasher, scoring takedown points and hampering opponents with suicidal smash-ups. It is riotous, kickabout fun.

Most Wanted needs to shake up its genre, says creative director Craig Sullivan, because “ultimately [racing games] are getting a bit boring”. It’s the Criterion confidence talking again when he has a swipe at simulation racers for their pristine sameyness: “I don’t want to drive a really nice shiny car around a track too many more times because I’ve done that”.

Central to Most Wanted’s fresh outlook is making each of its shiny, destructible licensed cars available from the get-go. From the workaday mid-rangers to the fancy exotics, the absurd Ariel Atom and hulking Ford F-150 Raptor, every car is somewhere in the city and immediately up for grabs in single player.

In theory, you can be doing 250 miles an hour in the fastest car in the game within five minutes. It’s the antidote, says Sullivan, to games “all about looking at that box and seeing that nice, cool, shiny car and most of the time going, ‘I’m never going to get to drive that f**king car, unless I play the game for 40 hours’”. Once discovered, a car’s location is marked on the city map for quick-travel future access.

That’s single player, though. In multiplayer, the system of car unlocks looks a lot more like the levelling in an online shooter (“We play a lot of CoD and Battlefield,” Sullivan says). Everything you do, offline and online, earns you experience points (“speed points”), and as you level up you unlock new rides, much like weapons in Call of Duty.

As you hit milestones in a certain vehicle, on the other hand, you unlock new mods. Do enough offroad driving in one car and you’ll get its offroad tyres. Win an event in another and you’ll bag a nitrous mod. Pleasingly, mods can be added to cars on the fly. Pity the cop chasing you when you install your nitrous dump mod in mid-pursuit.

Watch for smashable billboards.

On the streets of Fairhaven there are also Burnout Paradise-style repaint drive thrus that will have your battered vehicle fixed up and looking sharp in an instant. There are smashable billboards branded with Criterion’s peer developers (BioWare, DICE) as well, waiting to be claimed (read: smashed). Security gates can be likewise battered down, and you might find a desirable motor parked on the other side.

So there’s content and collectables aplenty, and all of it bound together by Criterion’s upgraded Autolog--the magical, telemetric social engine constantly feeding you stats on how you’re doing versus your friends and keeping the party going in multiplayer’s prescribed events.

For some tastes, Criterion’s Most Wanted is too close to Paradise City to make its mark, but the layer of back-end sophistication brought by Autolog 2.0 to extended play shouldn’t be underestimated. We predict good things for a Paradise powered by Autolog’s smarts.

Just read this whole article waiting to read the bit where it should say "The modifications that can be made to your cars are even better and more customisable than the original, simply imagine the original game on crack.." But no, none of that! This game needs proper car customisation to set it apart from burnout I think.

i don't know what the use to play a game we already playing it be4 ..... heeeeeey do something better create new games .... otherwise close the hole thing ... they revive the old games make us pay twice for the same experience we had ....

I deleted my bad grammer comments(except this 1).Hope you are happy! All u was interested in was the grammer not the game.Have fun playing this game ,cuz from wot i see is nothing like the one (made in 2005) that we all loved.

Honestly, this EA company infuriates me. I Love nfs most wanted with a passion, played it for hours and days. Now they ruin it with this ridiculous idea and think that this is what we need!. who the hell are they making these games for!. if they want to have fun time then keep it to their damn themselves and stop shoving bulls@@t down our throat. I wished there was a poll that gamers could go on and vote. A place where EA will see us and take action on what us nfs most wanted gamers want because there is no way i am going to waste my 60 dollars on this trash. I will be spreading the word so definitely they just lost money without the game being out yet. Give them hell fans!

I'm super excited for this game. I can see obvious cues from my two favourite racing games of the generation, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (racing dynamics, chases) and Driver: San Francisco (open landscape, online qualifiers). Criterion has yet to let me down, so I'm expecting big things from this game.

For ages I have been crying out for a new Most Wanted because i remember it being awesome to play and had a good story behind it. I just hope this is the same, not too much on-line and more indepth gaming. Underground 1 & 2 were awesome too. For me its all about the cars and street racing. To be honest, I'd rather race a highly modified skyline or impreza than a ferrari or zonda because they are cars i can actually afford to buy and drive.

@Descabar@t You dont like change and everyone has opinions dont they? I personally like the change and the direction they are heading in is definitley a positive one. So boo hoo for EA losing 60 bucks. I will be buying this game for sure because it looks fantastic, just my opinion.

@Monkey_N1nga OK, Monkey, no disrespect, but the point is to not discharge 'change' Would you like to be force fed something you don't want. What I am saying is, if something works don't change it, utilize it and improve upon it. They have a large fan base that like nfs most wanted for a reason. If they want to experiment on something, create another game with that content and see what happens. 'fail' They did it before and it didn't work this idea of there is not much different from what they have produce recently and look what happens. Fans are still complaining, obviously that means something I am just saying. And just because your buying it that doesn't make you any wiser or a help to them but rather supporting their ignorance.

@Descabar I also agree with the fact it needs a single player story but they have not released such a trailer yet, maybe some time in the future? Plus i have read that in the single player mode they will have 10 black lists, not 15 but 10 which is all right, makes more sense anyway. I also saw a video and read somewhere that there will be customization, such as visual(i.e. body kits, paint, rims, tires.) and performance(i.e. engine tuning, lighter parts). I do hope more people feel comfortable now since customization is now included, i sure was when i read the news, but racing is racing in the end, but i guess some people would argue if the main story line is the driving force of the game.

@Monkey_N1nga Bottom line, I would have loved to see an intriguing story trailer a game play similar to previous "most wanted" not "the run". A customization teaser then they can tell us whatever else they want. Love the new idea but disappointing if they dont have the rest. thats all I am saying. hopefully you understand now.

@Monkey_N1nga To explain to you everything will take a bit too long. Take the time and read through other postings and you will see for your self. My main worries is storyline for single player and vast customization. That's the main problem here, nfs most wanted had it and it kept me up for hours especially when i finish a race and cops still chasing me. The other games such as undercover was lacking such ingredients. I understand that they are trying something different, but when they choose to use this title nfs most wanted without presenting a storyline or customization trailer but rather clips of burnout style doesn't pull me in. it worries me. What they have presented so far sounds great but this heat that I am giving them is to express that if the game is only base on the content they have showed off so far, for a nfs most wanted franchise, it is a bad idea and I am pissed off.

@Descabar I agree with you somewhat about how cars are unlocked on the get-go in single player, but other than that they are not force feeding you anything everything else is optional, things such as new speed times and such and even multiplayer. I dont know if its just me but i like how they are integrating multiplayer even more deeply with the gameplay just because with multiplayer, the experience is different every time. BTW why are fans complaining, which aspects are they complaining about?